US sanctions target 41 companies hiding Prince Group scam money

The US Treasury Department has sanctioned dozens more people and companies tied to the Prince Group, the Cambodian operation accused of running forced-labour scam compounds that stole billions from people in the US, Europe and China. As reported by Recorded Future News, this is the third round of sanctions against the network since the US seized more than $15 billion in cryptocurrency from the group and its CEO. If you have lost money to a scam that moved through cryptocurrency or wire transfer, report it to the FBI's Internet Crime Complaint Center even if you think the money is gone.

What to do

• Report any scam involving cryptocurrency or international wire transfer to IC3.gov, since these cases feed exactly the kind of investigation that led to these sanctions.
• Check any crypto exchange or payment platform's fraud warnings before moving funds to an unfamiliar account.
• Keep records of transaction IDs, wallet addresses and messages if money has already been sent, in case recovery or law enforcement action becomes possible later.

Prince Group was dismantled earlier this year after its CEO, Chen Zhi, was arrested and extradited to China. But dismantling the company did not dismantle its money. Treasury officials say Prince Group executives responded to two earlier rounds of sanctions by shifting funds to shell companies, relatives and assistants, trying to keep hold of scam proceeds even after their main corporate structure collapsed.

Thursday's action names four people and 41 companies. Qiu Yong, a senior Prince Group official who held passports from Cambodia, St. Lucia and Turkey, ran shell companies in the British Virgin Islands and Hong Kong and laundered funds through money lending services and wine ventures; he was well known in Hong Kong for distributing wine there and in Macao. His assistant, Zhao Mengyao, was also sanctioned, with ties to other previously sanctioned Prince Group officials. Two Cambodian nationals, He Yujing and Visal Pang, are accused of holding property on behalf of sanctioned official Chen Bo, who transferred Japanese and Cambodian properties and businesses to He, his wife, and to Visal before his own sanctions took effect.

The pattern the sanctions describe is less a single company than a relay: money moved person to person, country to country, each handoff designed to put distance between the cash and the scam that produced it. Each round of sanctions closes one relay point; the next round exists because the network built another one. That is what three rounds against the same organisation, within a single year, actually show: the laundering network survives the arrest of its founder, and the US is now sanctioning the people and shell companies built to keep it running.

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